Gun Aramaic Vol.1 & 2 demonstrates Muslimgauze's ability to work through
an arrangement of signs/sounds, testing and proving their constructs, breaking
expectation, providing us with a politically ambient flux. These tracks are
tough, direct, uncompromising, not because of the anguished or anti-heroic
narrative they offer, but because the texture of the rhythms themselves, and
the complex fragmentation of syntax, are compelling and demanding. In every
case the artist's attention has moved without lapsing from one beat to the
next, placing each element according to its material characteristic:

Volume 1 is awash with waves and pulses, compressed dissonant flashes, fractured
speech at once fiercely fore-grounded and barely audible. And yet there is
always a rhythm, a Middle Eastern drone, a submerged bass line, or a variety
of percussion, expressed or implied, marking a place, its passage through
time, and its crude ramifications. Perhaps this is the sound one might hear
in the markets of Damascus and Amman, or in the brutal terror of Lebanon and
Gaza. Or is it both? Or neither. This is the key to the Muslimgauze project:
producing art that defies a closed interpretation, placing the listener in
the landscape's perpetual flux, and certainly not as passive observer. We
are not presented with, we are in, at the point where infinite plains intersect.
Tracks such as Saladin Mercy and Oil Prophets (parts 1,2,3) contain such a
complex mesh of oscillating vibration as to become disorienting, knowing that
any disorientation is also a reorientation, a constantly shifting perspective.
By defying closure, Muslimgauze engages in a political act of composition,
undermining the eviscerated, self-absorbed clichés of ambient music.
It is the vigor of context, of overt Palestinian self-determination, that
incites the listener to accept his or her role, often unconsciously, in linking
a multitude of elements, in effect, co-producing a political experience.

Carrying much of the same resonance and immediacy as its predecessor, Volume
2 opens where automatic weapons, machine-induced reverberations, and scraps
of narrative seamlessly dissolve and resurface, resulting in a highly charged,
discordant structure. Throughout this disc there are moments when the effect
is so great, it seems the listener is placed within the very center of a cyclical
mass that is breaking down, building up, breaking down. As on Shia Psalm ,
where a trap-set kicks in, or with the sonic bursts of Sharia Limb , there
is a definite urgency from its core, challenging western assumptions of the
Islamic vortex. Though the syntax is Arabic, the listener does not need to
know their hidden pathways, they work their effect through our linguistic
subconscious, forcing us to acknowledge objects of everyday utterance severed
at their cohesion point, rattling the cage of language. This is the truth
of landscape (and the Muslimgauze experience): sheer vectors of energy provoking
a parallel complexity in sound. Metabolism, not static object.